The Sun website bounced back in October, adding more than 180,000 daily unique browsers to take its total to 1.29 million.
This represented an increase of more than 16% after a 14% fall in September, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The Sun remains one of the smaller national newspaper websites after two years of charging for online access. In July the site began allowing readers to access a large portion of content for free, and from the end of November it will ditch the paywall completely.
The Sun’s rise came as all five of the most popular national newspaper websites posted small declines, with the Independent and Mirror Group national titles the worst hit with falls of about 5%.
However, Mirror parent company Trinity Mirror was buoyed slightly by growth from its network of regional newspapers, which saw a 2.6% rise in daily browsers, however the group as a whole was still down 2.2%. Last month Trinity announced a £200m deal to buy out local newspaper group Local World, which will give it control of more than 80 further titles.
The Guardian was down by 2.6% to 8.15 million daily unique browsers following a record month in September.
The fastest rising national newspaper website was Metro, which posted a 25% increase in daily unique browsers, taking it back up over the 1 million mark after it had shed almost half a million in the previous month. The Daily Star website also saw a large increase after a bad September, of 9.35% to 623,977 daily browsers.
MailOnline 13,246,053 (-0.89)
theguardian.com 8,153,603 (-2.59)
Telegraph 4,285,687 (-3.03)
Mirror Group nationals 3,702,001 (-4.93)
The Independent 2,634,560 (-5.25)
The Sun 1,286,605 (16.03)
express.co.uk 1,209,801 (-0.27)
Metro 1,159,637 (25.29)
dailystar.co.uk 623,977 (9.35)
Trinity Mirror regional network 2,123,819 (3.56)
